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Are Beekeeping Lessons Necessary?

If you’ve taken up beekeeping, you should decide soon if you are going to take beekeeping lessons. Well, you have decided to take up a great hobby that helps your garden, the environment, and produced that tasty sweet substance that we call honey. Besides honey, bees can also produce wonderful substances that are also powerful medicines that can be great remedies for a lot of things ranging from cancer to anemia. Most importantly, bees keep the flowers fertilized so that they turn into the fruits and vegetables that we nourish ourselves on.

If you are planning to engage in beekeeping for a small business, you may be delighted that starting up a beekeeping business does not require such large amounts of capital as other sectors in the agriculture industry require. You need your beekeeping supplies like beehives and colonies, starter sheets, registration with the FDA, and a bottling line for your honey. No serious harvesting equipment is needed as is with harvesting crops in the field. Whatever the reason is why you are taking up beekeeping, be it as a hobby or as a business venture, you might want to think about having beekeeping lessons to learn the industry.

There are many different beekeeping lessons which you can watch online or even buy literature and learn all the basics of beekeeping. You need to learn how to properly tend to your hives, how to harvest your honey without agitating the bees, when to harvest your honey, and so on.

The Internet has a great wealth of video lessons, which teach you how to keep your bees. Many beekeeping supply stores online also have a page with beekeeping lessons that include all the different breeds of bees that are available to beekeepers and which are the best breeds to have. Furthermore, you can also buy beekeeping lessons, which are on DVD, which you can watch in your own living room. You can learn a lot from these lessons. Furthermore, most beekeeping lessons are broken down into chapters that are easy to understand and you can learn about one aspect of beekeeping per lesson.

Which Beekeeping Lessons Will Work For You?

The best kind of beekeeping lessons you can have, however, are the kinds which give you the hands on experience that only an expert beekeeper can give you. If there is a beekeeper in your community, become friends with him. Let him show you a few pointers on how to keep bees. Many beekeepers are very friendly and love to share their passion about beekeeping and making honey. The wonderful thing about having a beekeeper that lets you watch him and work with him on his hives, you can learn many unique tricks of the trade.

First Lessons in Beekeeping

Beekeeping lessons and ethic groups tend to go hand in hand. Though beekeeping is just starting to grow in popularity in the United States, as there is also a movement of going organic and being “off the grid” is drawing many people to the idea of beekeeping. Though it is becoming part of a new fad among Americans, different immigrant groups in the United States have been keeping bees for a long time and many of their methods have been passed from generation to generation to way in the time that those immigrant families were still in the old country. If a beekeeper in your area is an immigrant from Eastern Europe or other parts of the world, getting to know him and watching how he tends his hives can be a wonderful learning experience. You need to know that some areas in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia have been keeping bees for centuries and they have it down to a science. Some of the beekeeping lessons from that part of the world are highly sophisticated and many families from that part of the world have been beekeepers and may all have their own techniques. Some of these techniques can be very unique and can allow you to produce some high quality product.

What To Expect With Your First Lessons In Beekeeping

Your first lessons in beekeeping should also explain the different breeds of honeybees and which ones have the best qualities for domestication. You also need to take into account that there are also feral bees, which can take over your hives. Good beekeeping lessons should also give you pointers on how to prevent this from happening. There are several breeds that are the best for domestication and they are listed below from the top of the list being the best and the last of the list being not the greatest, but most common.

A. The Caucasian grey honeybee is coveted by beekeepers all over the world. Its native area is Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Northern Armenia. This is the most common breed of domesticated honeybee within Georgia and Azerbaijan and is now being introduced into the United States. Caucasians are known as the best honeybee, because they are very gentile, compared to other bees and also have the capability to harvest the nectar from several different flowers in one flight. The Caucasian has a grey hue to the yellow and black striped body, hence its name. The Caucasian is also highly resistant to many bee diseases and can also fight off feral bees.

B. The Brazilian honeybee is also being introduced to the United States because of their ability to fight off feral bees and resistance to some hive parasites, but this variety can be aggressive when you go to tend the hives or harvest your honey. The Brazilian can only harvest the nectar from one flower in one flight, so you will need to have a particular flower from which you want your bees to produce near the hives.

C. The Italian honeybee is the most widely domesticated honeybee. This is also an average bee. This bee can produce good quality honey, but it does have its weaknesses. The Italian is very susceptible to disease and parasites, so they do require medication and in the case of viruses, many Italian colonies can get wiped out very easily from viruses. Like the Brazilian, the Italian can only harvest the nectar from only one flower in one flight.

You should also know a bit about feral bees and how to keep them from taking over your hive. There are many different feral bees around and they can be a problem. They can be very aggressive and take over your colonies. The worst varieties of feral bees, however, are in the southern states and are moving north. These are the African honeybees, also known as killer bees. You want to avoid these at all costs, because they are very aggressive and can take over quickly.

The fact is that you can learn quite a bit from beekeeping lessons so they are recommended and there is much information both online and offline about beekeeping, so take advantage of it.